Fred Arroyo is the author of Western Avenue and Other Fictions (University of Arizona Press, 2012), as well as The Region of Lost Names (U of Arizona P, 2008). Named one of the Top Ten New Latino Authors to Watch (and Read) in 2009 by LatinoStories.com, he is also a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission. Fred has published fiction, poetry, and essays in various literary journals and in the anthologies The Colors of Nature (Milkweed 2011) and Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing (University of Arizona 2010). Currently, he is completing a book of essays in which he lyrically meditates on work, reading and writing, migration and place—sources of creativity arising from his life and work in the Midwest, growing up bilingual on the East Coast, and then being caught between urban and rural worlds. He is also working on a novel set primarily in the Caribbean. Fred lives in Vermillion, South Dakota, where he teaches fiction and creative nonfiction in the MA/PhD Program in Creative Writing, as well in the undergraduate program at the University of South Dakota. Fred walks as much as possible, enjoys bike rides with his nine-year-old son, and finds as of late that driving in the upper Midwest is the tonic that brings writing and life together.

Stacy Bierlein

Stacy Bierleinis the author of the story collection A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends and a co-editor of the short fiction anthology Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience. Her award-winning anthology of international fiction, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, is used in university classrooms across the country. She is a founding editor of Other Voices Books and the Morgan Street International Novel Series. Her articles about writing, publishing, and the arts appear on various websites, including The Rumpus. She lives in Southern California.

Leslie Ingham

Leslie Ingham was classically educated at St. John’s College in Annapolis and has her MA in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Maryland. Her work has appeared in Fiction 365 and Energeia, and been recognized by Narrative Magazine. She is a founding member of San Francisco’s Portuguese Artists Colony, where she regularly reads her work. She is also an editor at PAC: Books, and is currently at work on a novel.

Patricia Ann McNair

Patricia Ann McNair’s collection of short stories is The Temple of Air. She has lived 98 percent of her life in the Midwest, where she’s managed a gas station, sold pots and pans door-to-door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and taught aerobics. Today she is an associate professor in the Fiction Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago, where she received a nomination for the Carnegie Foundation’s US Professor of the Year. Her collection of stories, called “a beautiful book, intense and original,” by Audrey Niffenegger, has received a number of honors, among them the winner of Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and the Society of Midland Authors Finalist Award.

Zack Rogow

Zack Rogow’s seventh book of poems is My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers, (Kattywompus Press, February 2012). He is editor and/or translator of nineteen books or plays. His writing has appeared in a variety of magazines, from American Poetry Review to Zyzzyva. His translations from French include work by Colette, George Sand, and André Breton. Currently he teaches in the low-residency MFA at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. His blog is titled Advice for Writers.

Jenn Scott

Jenn Scott’s stories have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Bellingham Review, The Gettysburg Review, Seattle Review, Santa Monica Review, Cream City Review, Phoebe, Confrontation, Gulf Coast, Juked, New South, and The Los Angeles Review. She lives with four cats and a husband in Oakland, California where she obsesses over football and is presumably at work on her first novel.

Rayme Waters

Rayme Waters is the author of the debut novel The Angels’ Share. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Dzanc Best of the Web Award. Most recently, her work has appeared in The Summerset Review, The Rumpus, and The Meadowland Review. Born in San Francisco, she grew up in Northern California and the city of Linköping, Sweden.